With quick development of various smart phone applications and Machine to Machine (M2M) applications, mobile network operators are becoming “pipe” providers and try to provide users with various Value Added Services (VASs), such as security protection, anti-advertisement service, video optimization/acceleration, web cache/Content Distribution Network (CDN), Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) header enrichment and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)/HTTP optimization.
Conventionally, a network operator can provide a package of VASs to a user based on the user's subscription to the operator and/or the operator's operation policies. For example, in order to provide two VASs, security protection and video acceleration, to user traffic of a user, the user traffic can be routed through two VAS servers (or VAS enablers), one for security protection and the other for video acceleration. Here, each VAS server can apply one or more VASs to the traffic passing through it.
Typically, such package of VASs is static. The routing topology, i.e., the VAS servers through which the user traffic is to be routed, is also static. It is thus difficult for the network operator to dynamically adjust the package to be provided to the user. For example, from the business perspective, the network operator may desire to adjust the package flexibly based on the user's payment ability or any other constraints on the user's subscription.
There is thus a need for an improved control of VAS provision.